Gear members used in power transmissions, particularly automatic power transmissions, generally have helical teeth, which are formed on automatic gear tooth forming machines. During the manufacturing process of these gears, it is possible to have the tooth malformed or a section of the tooth missing such as a nick or a break in one of the teeth.
Quite often the malformed portion of the tooth does not cover the entire full formed tooth but perhaps only half or less of the effective face width of the tooth, with a portion of the addendum and dedendum malformed. When these teeth are measured in the normal or conventional manner, the teeth of the checking gear or the master gear are fully meshed with the teeth on the production gear. With this system, the production gear might have a portion of the plane of action missing, which will not be recognized by the gear checking apparatus because of the fully engaged gear teeth. The present invention seeks to correct this disadvantage found in the current gear checking apparatus. Particularly on a checking apparatus without a gimble nick or lead check.